


in perpetuity

by aerynlallaboso



Category: Hellboy (Comics), Hellboy - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 07:41:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18426069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerynlallaboso/pseuds/aerynlallaboso
Summary: Three years after leaving the BPRD, Hellboy calls an old friend for assistance with a missing persons case.





	in perpetuity

**Author's Note:**

> hey.
> 
> i haven't posted on here in ages and ages and in fact this fic was written a full year ago, but after some prompting and in view of the fact that the new movie seems to be a garbage fire, here's something to make you feel a bit better. i hope you enjoy.

The cottage is almost completely bare. Not abandoned – it’s far too clean for that. What little furniture there is is spotless, upholstery laundered and tables scrubbed until the wood grain gleams. “You sure they were here yesterday?”

 

The local woman nods enthusiastically. “They’re always here. Never come down to hobknob with us, not even to church,” she says, mouth a moue of faint contempt. It doesn’t suit her wide features. Wrinkles her nose until her whole face is pinched up like she’s bitten into a whole lemon. “They got all their necessities delivered up here by little Riley, and _he_ says-“

 

“Riley?” Even the carpets have been cleaned. The people who lived here were trying to erase all evidence of their residence, and they’ve done a pretty good job. “Thought they were the Dobsons.” In the kitchen, though, propped haphazardly in an otherwise sparkling sink, are two dirty dishes. He goes to investigate them. The local woman - Edith Salmon, her name is - follows him with her eyes, unmoving.

 

On the plates, traces of fried seafood of some kind, krill or lobster, which tracks with the way the whole place stinks to high heaven of saltwater. He doesn’t like the way she’s tracking his movements. She has been since she met him this morning, intercepted him before the guy he was _supposed_ to be meeting got there and informed him that the Dobsons had skipped town. ‘Been run off’ was the exact phrasing she used, along with the implication that maybe his contact had accidentally tipped them off.

 

Her arms cross and uncross. “Riley’s a kid from the village. He used to deliver things to the Dobsons, groceries, the newspaper. Not because he _liked_ them, you understand. He was paid for it.”

 

“Do you know why this place stinks so bad?” he asks her. She stares at him. Keeps staring at him, rather. “Smells like friggin’ dead fish.”

 

“Mr Dobson was a fisherman,” she says. Her finger shoots out, towards the plates in the sink. “See? They ate a lot of it. That must be what you’re smelling.”

 

The salty tang in the air gets stronger. “Must be,” Hellboy says, unconvinced.

 

The back rooms are as uncluttered as the front. Two bedrooms, oak bed-frames stripped of mattresses and accompanying linens. A bathroom with an astonishingly wet tiled floor - he almost slips walking into it. Edith Salmon says, “Whoops!” and grabs his hand to stop him tumbling backwards.

 

Her skin is loose, a little slimy. “Thanks,” he says to her. “What’s behind this house? Must be close to the water if Mr Dobson was out there a lot, catching all those fish.”

 

“Oh yes, out every day. There’s a tiny pier out there.” Edith Salmon’s hair is a nondescript mud-colour and as straight as if it were ironed, but her eyes are a fascinatingly vibrant shade of green. Her pupils seem a bit too small. “I used to see him on my way back from the shore, dangling his rod. Waiting for something to bite. I do some fishing myself. And shell collecting. I have quite a number of lovely conches. Perhaps you’d like to see them after we’re done here?”

 

They are back in the kitchen. There is mud tracked on the floor out of the bedrooms, some of it imprinted in cloven hoofprints that are definitely his fault, and some of it human footprints. One of the feet has seven toes. Hellboy looks down at the floor.

 

Edith Salmon isn’t wearing shoes. “Sure,” he says. “First, how about you take off that human skin you’re wearing? I gotta say, skinchangers are usually a bit better at acting the part than you. Did _Mr_ Dobson have something to take care of this morning?”

 

Somewhere outside the cottage, nearer the rest of the village, he hears a bell ringing.

 

“Fuck you,” Edith Salmon spits, and moves faster than he can. Her bare feet swing up, into the air, knocking him off balance with a wild leap towards the cottage’s back window. She pivots in the air, spine folding inhumanly, and lands running. Her feet have less toes the farther she gets from the cottage.

 

Hellboy mutters, “Jesus,” and barrels his way out of the cottage’s back door. He wonders, briefly, what happened to his actual contact, and why the guy who got hold of him last week neglected to mention that the skin-changers living in his village appear to be of a more amphibious sort than the average werewolf or werebear. Probably didn’t know. It’s not like werewolves are uncommon in this part of the world.

 

Edith Salmon - undoubtedly not her actual name - sprints on ahead of him, not bothering to look behind her or try and obstruct his pursuit. Her legs are stubbier, the pinkish skin on them slipping away in favour of short, slick fur, her neck sinking horribly into her narrow shoulders. The ground beneath Hellboy’s feet has begun sloping down from the cottage, grass dropping away sharply in favour of mud and harder, rockier ground. He doesn’t like that. Doesn’t at all like it when he starts gaining on Salmon just as her destination comes in sight: the tiny pier that she spoke of inside the cottage.

 

He swears again. Salmon’s legs pump hard; he almost loses sight of her on the way down the hill, then again when something white flutters back and hits him in the face. Sputtering, he snatches it out of the air and realises that it’s the shirt Salmon was wearing when she met him earlier.

 

She is standing beside the pier. Barely a pier, really, more of a rotten pile of planks jutting from the shoreline. As he gets closer, she whips her neck around to look at him; she grins, and her mouth is overcrowded, pointed teeth backed by a sheet of solid grimy-white bone that looks like the mouth of a whale. Then she raises her hand, fingers sticking together with strands of skin, waves it at him, and dives gracefully into the ocean.

 

Hellboy stops running. It takes him a second on the slope, almost tripping over his own hooves before he comes to a total standstill on the edge of the shoreline. There’s a short drop to the ocean; the surface of the water is grey-blue and broken by lazy ripples. The skin-changer has gone where he can’t follow. Not without full scuba gear.

 

“Ah, shit,” Hellboy says.

 

* * *

 

Andrew Hare, the man who originally wrote to him about the skin-changer, lives close to the centre of the village, in a squat stone house backing a cheesemaker’s shop. The solid wood slab of his front door does, in fact, smell faintly of parmesan, but more importantly, it’s locked. No amount of knocking or yelling has gotten Hellboy anything more than curious glances from the people on the street.

 

“Sorry,” he says to the man he hasn’t met yet, putting the full weight of his shoulder to bear on the door. The hinges crunch, splinter, give way altogether.

 

A mingled smell of sweat and saltwater. His nerves start to sing danger, scanning an open living room and kitchen. On the floor beside a natty old television set, a towheaded young man is sprawled unconscious, a pair of round glasses lying a few inches from his face. They have been shattered. Stepped on, maybe.

 

Hellboy kneels beside him, brushes the spectacles out of the way. Hare’s ankles are bound, but not his wrists; he draws him up against his legs and shakes him. A smear of dried blood colours Hare’s skin from his nose to one corner of his mouth.

 

“Hey,” Hellboy says. Hare’s eyes flicker under their lids. “Hey! Wake up, kid. Who did this to you?”

 

The young man mutters something. His head lolls to the side.

 

“I don’t have time for this,” he decides aloud, and pulls back his wrist to slap the kid. Then he stops, switches hands, and hits Hare on the cheek with his regular palm instead of his red-stone-possibly-key-to-hell gargantuan one. Now _that_ ’d be a hard thing to explain to Hare’s neighbours.

 

The man’s lids flicker again and finally stay open, a groan escaping his mouth, gulping like a dying fish. “You’re Hellboy,” he manages.

 

Hellboy salutes him with one finger. “One and only. You see who knocked you out?”

 

“Yes.” Andrew Hare’s voice is older than his face, thick and rasping. He grimaces and attempts to push himself up off the floor, knees knocking together as he discovers the bonds around his ankles; Hellboy fishes for a knife in his pocket and cuts them, then helps him over to the kitchen table. Only once he’s propped up on a chair does Hare clear his throat and start to explain.

 

“This morning, when I was about to leave to come meet you, Ida Dobson came knocking on my door.”

 

“Mrs Dobson?” Hellboy has taken the opposite chair, turned it around and plonked himself on it backwards. “Thought so. She picked me up a bit later than you were going to. I guess she had to come here and see to you first.”

 

Hare shakes his head. “No, no, not Mrs Dobson - there’s three of them,” he says. “Mr and Mrs Dobson, Greta and Harald, and Greta’s sister, Ida. She moved in with them a few months ago, and that’s when I started to realise that something was terribly, awfully wrong with them. The other two were very normal people, if reclusive, but people here tend to keep to themselves anyway. Unless you’re a member of the church. They’re all about community and meetings.” He makes as if to adjust the edge of his absent glasses, then brings his hand down and looks at it miserably. “When Ida arrived, she was invited to Sunday service by the usual welcoming party. Rachael, Simon, and their little boy, Riley.”

 

“Ida Dobson mentioned Riley. She said he brought them the paper, stuff like that.”

 

“He did,” Hare says. His mouth droops at the edges. “Riley was a good boy. Ten years old, and his parents thought he was old enough to have a paper round and do small deliveries for the grocer - just for pocket money. I talked to Rachael and she said the Dobsons liked him. Ida liked him. That must be why she took him.”

 

His hand is trembling around the glass of water Hellboy fetched for him. “He disappeared, what, two weeks ago? That’s when you decided to call me in.”

 

“Three weeks. It wasn’t until after, after the police had started investigating, that I started to think Ida-” Hare stops abruptly and drains the glass of water, swallowing twice. He wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “She’s not _human_ , none of them are. Whenever she shook my hand, she felt _wet_ ; when she showed up at my _house_ today, I knew - I thought I could surprise her when her back was turned, but she rushed me past the threshold and I couldn’t do anything about it.” He shudders.

 

Hellboy says, “She’s fast. Comes with not being human.” He leans over and pats Hare’s shoulder, with his ordinary hand. “You gonna be alright?”

 

Hare’s head jerks. He takes it as a nod. “Well, good news is I already know where Ida went after she knocked you on your ass. Shouldn’t take too long to track her down again, if you want to come with me, but we need to stop off outside the village first.”

 

“What? Why?”

 

“I made a call,” Hellboy says, grinning.

 

“Alright, I - let me get a spare pair of spectacles first.” The stool’s feet scrape loudly as Hare pushes it back with his own and stands, not uncertainly, before disappearing into a corridor behind the kitchen that Hellboy presumes leads to his bedroom. He listens to Hare’s footsteps for a minute or so, tracks the soft sounds of him rummaging through his belongings, to be sure that he isn’t about to get another surprise like this morning. You never can be too sure with shape-changers. Hare himself had said he hadn’t suspected anything unusual about the Dobsons in particular until Ida showed up.

 

Hellboy turns his chair back around and pushes it neatly under the table. He exits the house, delicately stepping over the thin wood slab of broken front door in the entranceway. The village street outside is as quiet as when he entered for the most part. The wind has picked up, though, way up, ruffling the yellowing grass in Hare’s meagre front garden. Blowing from the west. Must be about where he told the helicopter to meet them.

 

Sure enough, when Hare emerges from the house and locks the door behind him, there is a tiny black gnat in the sky to the west, growing larger. “Come on,” Hellboy says to him. “Gotta get there before they land.”

 

“Okay,” Hare says, mystified. His spare glasses are square, not round, and don’t flatter his dark, squinting eyes.

 

They set a brisk pace down the street, Hellboy glancing upwards every few minutes to watch the gnat evolve into a bullfly, then a flying matte black bullfrog, a sleek and shiny pigeon-sized hunk of metal. By the time they reach the very edge of the village, marked by the thinning of the gravel path they have been following to thick, well-trod dirt, he can just about make out the decaled logo on the helicopter’s side. “B.P.R.D.,” he reads off for Hare’s benefit.

 

Hare asks, “Aren’t you an agent for them?”

 

“Probably could’ve picked a better spot to land,” Hellboy remarks loudly instead of answering the question, shielding his face from the whirl of dirt and foliage-smelling air being blown up at them. “Or you know what, maybe that’s my fault. I didn’t think I was gonna have to call in the cavalry.”

 

“Mr Hellboy-”

 

“Just Hellboy!” he shouts over the buffeting of the blades, and then someone else yells “Hellboy!” from the inside of the helicopter.

 

From the edge of his vision, he notes Hare swallowing, taking in the newcomer jumping the last foot down from the copter’s belly, waving to the pilot in its nose. Maybe he should’ve warned the kid. He _did_ just deal with a saltwater-smelling home invader who seems to be a kind of aquatic creature, and now Hellboy has invited another one to come help them.

 

Abe doesn’t smell of saltwater, though. Mostly just kind of… fresh.

 

“Hi,” he says as the helicopter takes off. “Abe. Good to see you again.”

 

“Three years,” Abe says. He blinks his faintly luminous blue eyes. “Who’s this?”

 

“Uh, Andrew Hare. My contact here in the-”

 

“I’m Abe Sapien, with the B.P.R.D.,” one of his oldest friends says, very obviously ignoring him and extending a green hand to Hare. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I was out this way about twenty years ago for a werewolf infestation, but I don’t think I ever met anyone from this village.”

 

Hellboy exhales a little louder than necessary. He watches Hare take the hand gingerly and shake it, and then do his best to restrain his urge to wipe his palm on his pants. The clamminess and the satin-fine webbing between Abe’s fingers do that to most people, he’s found.

 

“I understand you’re not being troubled by a werewolf this time?”

 

“No, ah-” Hare is trembling again. Like a rabbit in fucking headlights. “I’m sorry, Mr Sapien, I was only supposed to be giving information to Mr Hellboy when he arrived, I didn’t expect to be - attacked. By the woman I asked him here to investigate. I’m a bit out of sorts.” His eyes are wet behind his glasses. “If we can go somewhere quieter, I can tell you what you need to know and then I think I’ll take my leave.”

 

“S’okay,” Hellboy tells him. “Abe’s going to be handling the heavy lifting on this one; I can tell him what he needs to know and back him up. You can go on home. I’ll call you if we want more details.”

 

Hare nods, adjusts his glasses, and turns on his heel back up the path.

 

A light breeze, some lingering shadow of the helicopter’s fierce buffeting, rustles through the thick ankle-height grass around them. Just the two of them. “Hey,” Hellboy says, again. “You look good.”

 

He half expects Abe to ignore him some more and go tramping off behind Hare, but instead he just - looks at him. “And you look about the same,” Abe says. His lips curl thoughtfully. “Why am I here?”

 

“Shape-changer. Three, from what the kid’s told me.” Pointing a thumb over his shoulder. “I ran into the same one he did checking out their cottage a couple hours ago, and she got the drop on me. Went out the window and straight into the water. Not like anything I’ve seen in this neck of the woods before, so I figured I needed someone else’s expertise.”

 

“Nobody rents scuba gear out here?”

 

“It’s a tiny little village a mile from the sea, not the goddamn Gold Coast.”

 

Abe presses the heel of his hand to his temple. “Let’s just get going,” he says, striding past Hellboy. His boots leave heavy imprints on the dirt path.

 

* * *

 

There is a path out to the Dobsons’ house that avoids the village almost entirely, Hellboy discovers on his second trip out there. It diverges from the main path invisibly, traipsing up the hill in a circular route that detours past two more cottages built closer to the ocean. One is dingy, missing roof tiles and with the front door mostly caved in - which reminds him that he’ll have to send Hare something to have his replaced. Property damage must be his biggest cash drain after food these days.

 

The other cottage looks inhabited. They give it a wide berth. “Don’t want to scare the kids,” Hellboy says to Abe, who remains quiet.

 

He doesn’t like the silent treatment. Reminds him of those soldiers back on the base decades ago who never _quite_ got used to him, who kept stoic-faced and stiff-lipped in the face of the demon child asking if they’d like to play catch with him, a look in their eyes only recognisable as fear in adult hindsight. What the fuck did they think he was going to do if they talked to him, anyway?

 

“How’s Liz?”

 

“Fine.”

 

“Kate and Roger?”

 

“Fine.” They keep pace together easily. An old rhythm, simple to find again. “You could ask them yourself. You know how to use a cell phone?”

 

“Well, I’m not big on technology. I had one for a while. Could never keep the thing charged properly. It gets kinda hard to find a landline in the middle of broken down ruins and rainforests, too.”

 

“You could’ve written.”

 

“Yeah,” he admits.

 

The Dobson cottage looms in sight at the crest of the hill. It looks somehow smaller than when Hellboy was here this morning, as if the sea air has already begun the long process of erosion. Abe glances at it, but Hellboy waves him on. No need to check the house when they already know where the Dobsons are.

 

He’s already relayed most of what Hare told him at the house; approaching the drop to the water he tells Abe about chasing Ida Dobson, points out the broken-down pier lancing out from the shore. “I don’t know how far she went, is the big problem. Actually, I don’t even know if the three of them are still in this area. They could’ve swum off the instant she went in and be halfway up the coast by now. But I’m betting not. They lived here for a while, probably have some underwater hideout pretty nearby, and they’ve got the kid with them.”

 

“What do you think they’re doing with him?” Abe asks. He has a pair of binoculars pulled from one of his utility pockets and is surveying the shoreline, the water. From this distance without magnification the horizon is one long navy blue line, fuzzy and tapering at the edges. “Most shape-changers have a method of turning humans into their own kind. Werewolves and most other mammal species bite or consume blood. Or it could be demonic. They might have an underwater summoning circle.”

 

“I love it when you talk shop.” Far out, something breaks the glittering edge of the ocean with a tiny dark shape, then vanishes. A ship passing briefly into view, or maybe a dolphin. “I told you, this isn’t anything I’ve seen before. It had two sets of teeth. Fur, maybe like a seal.”

 

Abe puts his binoculars back in their pocket, and Hellboy walks with him down to the shore. There is no beach here, just a very short fall directly down into the water lapping at the stone underneath them. Give it a few hundred years, he thinks, and most of the cliff won’t be here anymore.

 

“Well?”

 

“Well, I’m not going in in this.” Abe finds the zip at the neck of the tactical vest he’s wearing and yanks, pulls it all off over his arms. Under it, he wears a thin grey shirt with a neck wide enough to bare most of his shoulders. That goes too. Then the boots, socks - Hellboy watches, fascinated. Used to be Abe shipped out in nothing out but shiny black shorts and a utility belt. A period he remembers fondly, until the whole monkey-with-a-gun incident.

 

He blinks away old memories to see Abe pulling off his pants, and is about to make an ill-advised comment when he realises he’s wearing those old waterproof shorts underneath. “Woah. You came prepared.”

 

“Diving in soggy pants is horrible.”

 

“No shit.”

 

A smile tugs at the corner of Abe’s mouth; he turns his head away and says, “You mentioned fur. Ever meet a selkie?”

 

“Yeah.” Hellboy sits down on the edge of the cliff, heaping folded clothes beside him. “Long story short, they don’t usually look like that. Are you going in or am I gonna have to call back for scuba gear?”

 

The spray from Abe’s lean elbow-finned body hitting the water splashes him in the face.

 

* * *

Down below, everything is blue.

 

The water is pleasantly cool on Abe’s skin, and the faint pressure of the current feels nice on his gills. It’s been a while since he went on a mission that required him to swim; he registers his eyes blinking swiftly, widening, adapting to give him a better view through the gentle liquid haze, his breathing slowing.

 

He swims with long, languid strokes at first, drifts along the cliff’s edge to investigate the structural integrity of the cliff itself. Underwater caves are not uncommon in places like this, but he doesn’t see anything to suggest that whatever creatures the Dobsons might be have nested directly under the drop-off. Further out, then.

 

Abe turns, swims out, his relaxed movement turning more purposeful. It is very early afternoon, with plenty of light to see by, but he retrieves a flashlight from his belt anyway, strobes it over the darker areas below him. The seabed is several metres down, a thick blanket of silt dotted with rocks and patchy foliage. And - white things. Thin, delicate little white things that catch the light of his torch.

 

Fish bones, he realises after a few minutes of swimming over them. A lot of them.

 

He flutters down to pick one up, dribbling air bubbles, and turns it over in his hands. There are tiny, neat chips in each bone that are fairly easy to recognise as tooth-marks. Human canines, or something close to them. Abe blows air violently out of his gills and tosses the stick-thin bone back to the seabed.

 

He keeps swimming. The bones keep coming. It’s a veritable fish massacre down here; he wonders if anybody besides the Dobsons comes down to that shitty little pier to cast their rods. They’d be unlikely to catch anything if they did.

 

Abe also wonders, not without trepidation, where the child is. At least he hasn’t seen any human skeletons down here so far, but maybe the creatures have kept the body in their nest to reduce chance of discovery. He wishes Hellboy had told him there was a missing kid involved before he’d come down here. He wishes Hellboy had told him anything at all, really. Wishes Hellboy hadn’t only called him for the first time in three years to ask his help on a mission.

 

A flash of movement in his peripheral vision stops that potentially treacherous train of thought dead in its tracks. Approaching from ahead is something that at first makes him think Hellboy was wrong about this not being a selkie encounter, a long, lithe creature with a two-flippered tail that slithers through the water behind it.

 

Then it gets closer, head bobbing side to side in rhythmic motions, and he sees its slack jaw filled with filed-point canines and more white behind them, set below greenish eyes in an elongated skull. Thin and disturbingly human arms sprout from halfway down its sides, sporting talon-like fingers, and all of it is covered in fur. Thick, oily fur, designed to trap heat in a layer of blubbery meat underneath.

 

Its head keeps nodding in a pattern that makes Abe queasy, sends him scrabbling for the radio he has at his belt, only there’s nobody on the other end. He forgot to ask if Hellboy has one and get his frequency, because he was annoyed at him. _Fuck_ , he breathes into the water, and then there is another creature coming behind the first.

 

He can’t see where they’re coming from. A cavern close by, some outcropping of rock nearer the coast that they followed him from, maybe down. The third creature is swimming up when it emerges from the shadow of the second, grinning its two-in-one grins and sweeping its head from shoulder to shoulder. It looks larger than the other two, and more hostile in its movements, but none of them are attacking him. His hand is curled around the handle of his combat knife anyway.

 

One of the creatures swims a couple metres away of him and stops. It peers at him, claws tracing invisible patterns in the water, and sweeps upward, over him. Abe starts, pulls his knife from its holster, but the creature doesn’t come at him. The other two follow their comrade, moving lazily around each other and him, darting quick glances at him while they perform delicate shimmies. But for their arms, they could almost be seals or dolphins dancing a seabound jig in a circle over him.

 

It’s almost beautiful. Abe almost forgets to be afraid.

 

The second creature dives inches from his face, eyes twitching over him and then widening: if monstrous skin-changing creatures could look shocked, he thinks it looks shocked. It cracks open both sets of teeth and lets loose a silent howl at him. Abe recoils, turns, but the largest of the creatures is behind him without warning. It lashes out with its spindly hands and leaves a scarlet line on his skin from shoulder to sternum.

 

Abe yells, and swings wide at the creature with his knife. It takes a stab to the torso and shifts out of his way, and he rushes past it. Hard strokes, swimming fast for the shore with one of the uninjured creatures on his tail - he confirms this with one look backwards, the only one he allows himself. Checking how far they are from him wastes precious seconds. Time is important, because he realises halfway back to shore that there is blue mixed in with the gaussian blur of red blood escaping his chest. His wound doesn’t hurt, either, but his vision is starting to go fuzzy at the edges, and he can hear the chasing creature’s movements slowing. Like it isn’t putting as much effort in anymore. Like it knows he’s going to pass out before he reaches the shore.

 

He holds on tighter to his knife between strokes. The cliff is visible, he’s almost _there_ \- he flips the knife, feels the blade dig into his palm instead of the hilt. The pain ups his heartbeat and shears away some of the cotton wool clogging his senses, gets him those few last metres-

 

Abe erupts from the water. His hands find the cliff’s eroded-smooth side and slip, but Hellboy’s hand is there to grab him and drag him bodily out of the ocean. “Jesus, Abe, are you okay? Hey, _Abe_ , I said-”

 

His final sensation is that of Hellboy cradling him in his arms, and the dizzied relief that comes with it easily overpowers any embarrassment he feels before his consciousness opts to take the easy way out and hard crash to blackness.

 

* * *

 

Abe drifts back to wakefulness with his back against a hard, cold floor. He groans, shifts, his elbow digging into the ground, and thinks for a second that he would’ve expected to see Kate’s worried face hovering over him by now, or Johann’s expressionless dome - still somehow projecting concern.

 

Then he remembers.

 

“Hey.”

 

“Hey,” Abe tries to say. His tongue feels like a wadded up tissue flopping around the inside of his mouth; he leans over and spits. “Ugh. Hey.”

 

Hellboy sits across from him, head tilted back against the bare wall, legs spread. This must be the Dobsons’ cottage; no furniture, the lingering reek of the ocean permeating through the air, sticky on Abe’s skin. Through the low-set window above Hellboy’s head, he can see the sky is purple fading to black, like a bruise.

 

“How long was I out?”

 

“Few hours,” Hellboy says. “That thing didn’t hurt you all that much, by the way. Scratched up the skin and got all that blue goop into you. Anaesthetic shit. I patched you up while you were under.”

 

Abe drags himself up onto his elbows and shuffles backwards until his back hits the opposite wall and he can shift himself into a marginally more comfortable position. He meets Hellboy’s yellow eyes across the room, ignores the fact that he’s chosen to seat himself as far away as possible from his old… friend. “Thanks.”

 

“You’re welcome. What happened?”

 

“There were three of them, and they attacked me.” He gestures to his chest and the neatly bandaged scratch. “They must secrete that stuff through their claws. I didn’t see a weapon, or-”

 

Hindsight hits him without the disadvantage of a ball of cotton wool clogging his brain. “There was another one. A much smaller one, more like a child - shit, it was just a shape, I didn’t get a close enough look at it to make sure it was the boy.” Abe rubs his head. “It was moving, though. I don’t know what that means.”

 

“Guess we’ll find out in the morning,” Hellboy says, stretching his legs wider. “You shouldn’t go back in without back-up, but-”

 

“I have a spare breather with my gear.”

 

“ _What_?” He’d forgotten how comical Hellboy could look when something surprised him, with that huge red jaw of his hanging half-open. He’d also forgotten how endearing he finds it. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

 

“I was mad at you,” Abe says to the floor.

 

The silence that unfolds between them now is salt-scented, so strong that he fancies he can feel it eroding the ground under him, the tips of his fingers sinking into crumbling wood and earth; then Hellboy breaks it by laughing. Just a snort, accompanied by his head shaking in Abe’s peripheral vision, but it makes something _crack_ , sends tension fleeing his shoulders. “How are you, Abe?”

 

“I’m okay.”

 

“No, how _are_ you?”

 

“I’m fine,” he insists, then quieter, “But I missed you.”

 

“I missed you, too. Hasn’t been a single day that I didn’t think about you, y’know.”

 

“I thought about quitting after you left,” Abe says. He sits up straighter, so he can look at Hellboy - really look at him, drink him in like a thirsty man in the goddamn desert. Maybe it still hasn’t hit him that he’s _here_ , real, not just a passing lonely dream that he can forget over coffee the next morning. “I wanted to come after you, but I knew you’d just send me back to them.”

 

“Well, someone has to keep them on their toes, look out for the little guys like us. It just couldn’t be me anymore.” Now Hellboy is the one staring at the floor. “You get what I’m talking about, right?”

 

“Yeah.” He does. He always has. What they used to talk about in bed at night when nobody else could hear, under Hellboy’s sheets where nothing but them mattered - the feeling he had that something was going to come for him someday. That the crown of flame sat invisible over the forehead Abe had laid good morning kisses on so many times was going to burst into real light, that Hell would claim its son at last. Or maybe God would come down from Heaven and mark him instead. Stranger things had happened.

 

Whatever. He’d known when Hellboy left that it wasn’t personal. It was cosmic. It was bureaucratic. It was just what happened when you were in love with the prodigal prince of Hell, and it hurt like a gunshot to the chest.

 

Hellboy says, “I still should’ve written. I’m sorry about that.”

 

Above his head, a smattering of stars glint across the fully black sky. Slowly, Abe gets to his feet and crosses the room and sits back down at Hellboy’s side. The graze on his chest protests with a dull throbbing; he tells it silently to shut the fuck up and twines his fingers through Hellboy’s, feels the warm pressure of Hellboy’s arm and then his head resting on Abe’s shoulder.

 

“You should get some rest,” he says. He senses rather than sees the answering smile. “I’ll be here in the morning.”

 

Fifteen minutes later, Hellboy begins to snore.

 

* * *

 

Dawn is early and pale, the sickly off-white of mushrooms after rain. Abe walks down to the village to rustle up some breakfast. His absence is short, but already Hellboy feels off without him there. It’s been a few _hours_ since Abe had a real conversation with him, dammit - this is why he never managed a phone call.

 

They eat slightly stale ham and cheese sandwiches on the cliff above the ocean once Abe gets back, sitting sprawled and cross-legged respectively in the green grass. Abe takes small bites and pulls things out of his shorts pockets, spreads them on the grass between them. A breather, a tiny, waterproof radio - “This bit in your ear, this bit attaches to the breather like this,” and he demonstrates. “They made me a slightly more independent model, since I don’t need the breather underwater.”

 

“They give you a waterproof gun yet?” Hellboy inquires, biting his crusts off.

 

“They did, actually, but I didn’t bring it with me. My pistol’s next to useless underwater. All I have is the knife.”

 

“And my fists, huh?”

 

“I have another knife if you want it.”

 

He considers, then nods. Abe finds the second knife, flips it over in his hand and offers it to him hilt-first. Hellboy sheathes it one of his own pockets. He, like Abe, wears only black shorts for the dive ahead of them; his trenchcoat is bundled up on the kitchen counter in the cottage with the rest of his possessions.

 

Brushing his hands free of crumbs, Hellboy stretches forward and yawns. “You said three yesterday? No, four with the little one.” He doesn’t know what to do about that one. He hates it when it’s kids. Always ends in tears, more often anguished than joyful. “Hopefully we can get them to talk now that we’re more of a threat. Convince them to give Riley back. If not, try and grab him and get out before they can get any of the blue shit into us.”

 

“That’s a big if,” Abe says, gathering his scattered things in his arms and starting to sort them back into their pockets. “You don’t want me to-”

 

“They lived here for months as ordinary people before they suddenly grabbed a kid and ran. I think we’ll be okay.” He gets up on one knee, uses it to push up to his feet. “They’re not fae or changelings. Thank god. Shape-changers can be pretty understanding if you catch ‘em on a good day.”

 

Abe glances up at the sky. The mottled cream of dawn is stained a darker grey-blue now, pretty but promising rain or heavier later in the day; the ocean is an unfriendly navy carpet stretching out from the horizon. “Hopefully they consider this a good day.”

 

“What’s wrong with a little drizzle? They _live_ in the water.”

 

“I sleep in a tank of it and you don’t see me jumping around in puddles whenever it rains.”

 

“That just means you do it when I can’t see,” Hellboy says, and is rewarded with the tiny smile on Abe’s face as he finishes putting his gear away. “We going in?”

 

“After you.”

 

He winces as he dons his breather, peers over the edge of the cliff into the water, and takes the drop the way he takes all falls he has advance notice of - steps forward as if he expects there to be solid ground underneath him and pitches sideways into the ocean. Surface tension slams into his stone-flesh arm and sends it tingling like mad.

 

A smaller eruption in the water beside him is Abe’s less awkward entrance, complete with thumbs-up. “Can you hear me?”

 

“Sort of,” Hellboy mouths into the plastic mask of his breather. “I’m gonna get a damn ear-ache from all the vibrations.”

 

Another thumbs-up. He shakes his head, rolls with the movement into a more horizontal position so he can swim forward instead of just treading water below the surface, and Abe mimics him. His partner makes a few more hand motions - why even bother with the radio? - pointing away from the shore. _That way._ Into the depths turned ominously dark by the lack of sunshine above the waves. Cool.

 

Hellboy paddles backwards and rests his feet on the rock of the cliff for a second, pushes off to torpedo his way past Abe. It’s been quite a while since his last voluntary swim, but the rhythm is easy to find again. Arm over arm, kicking up a solid stream of bubbles, keeping Abe’s sinuous, silvery form in his peripheral vision. The silence down here is more comfortable than the silence they’d had up above, when Abe first got here. It could almost be like old times.

 

He’s going to miss him when he has to leave again. Like twisting a fucking knife.

 

A startled sound over the radio. Hellboy stops kicking and pulls up short next to Abe. “What?” he says. Abe’s eyes are thin dashes of blue squinting into the open expanse of water before them; his watery breathing is just about audible over the radio.

 

Abe says, “There,” and where he points, Hellboy sees a black shape. Approximately humanoid-shaped and getting larger, closer. “I can only see one of them. The hell? We’re not anywhere near as far from shore as I went yesterday. The others must be back in whatever little hole they all live in.”

 

“Let’s back up,” Hellboy suggests, punctuates his words with an arm swung back towards the greater certainty of land. “Get defensive. We can take one of them easy.”

 

The shape undulates closer. He can make out more features with its approach, the spindly human-esque arms and thick tail, and starts to paddle backwards at Abe’s affirming nod. They must have only been swimming for a few minutes, he realises, because when he turns around properly he can see the vague outline of the cliff in the distance. The creature is coming out to meet them, alone.

 

It wants to talk, Hellboy decides. His conclusion is only strengthened when the creature starts to catch up to them and slows down, backing off like it wants to look non-threatening. Definitely not the one that attacked Abe, which he also has decided was Ida Dobson. The aggressive cousin. This creature is one of the other Dobsons.

 

Soon enough, they are at the cliff again. Abe reaches up and pulls himself out of the water, helps Hellboy out - he snatches the breather out of his own mouth and snorts water out of his nostrils, restrains himself from shaking like a dog. “Remembered why I don’t do that much anymore,” he says, and then jumps back from the cliff, because another hand has just latched onto the earth from the ocean.

 

The creature’s emergence isn’t as horrifying as he originally thinks it’s going to be; it’s almost completely human by the time it has hauled itself onto dry land. _He_ is almost completely human.

 

“Mr Dobson, I presume,” Hellboy says.

 

Dobson nods shakily. Slick fur on his neck is overgrown by sallow skin, patches of the same fur Ida Dobson grew in her transformation earlier shrinking until this Dobson only has hair and a thin moustache of the stuff. It doesn’t magically turn into ordinary human hair at this point, Hellboy is vaguely surprised to note, just remains wet, dripping fur. Makes him look like a drowned rat.

 

“Cousin,” Dobson says. His voice is uncomfortably reminiscent of Abe’s: mid-range, pleasant, and beginning in the throat rather than the chest. He also seems to be addressing Abe when he repeats, “Cousin,” to which Abe reacts with clear distaste. “I’m sorry for the state you’ve found yourself in, cousin. We were trying to help you when you appeared before us. It was to be a mercy killing, you understand? But you fled before we could deliver the final blow or make the appropriate rites.” Fat lips meet in a sort of depressed pout. “If you would join us under the waves again, we-”

 

“You’re not _killing_ Abe,” Hellboy says angrily at the same time that Abe tells Dobson, “I’m no cousin of yours. You’re a shapechanger, aren’t you?”

 

“Are you not?”

 

“No,” Abe says, crossing his arms. “I just look like this.”

 

Dobson blinks too-bright eyes and wipes droplets of saltwater from under a rounded, puggish nose. “I - my apologies, my regrets,” he says, real sincerity colouring his tone. “We thought that you were a, a shape-changer as well, between forms. It’s a rare occurrence, but it _does_ happen. We kill any unfortunate enough to be trapped like that immediately, of course.”

 

Abe’s voice is dry as the Sahara. “Of course.”

 

The burgeoning outrage in Hellboy’s gut is mollified by the way Dobson seems to _squirm_ under their combined gazes. His fingers shake like a nicotine addict’s, their nails seeming to change length and sharpness constantly. One nail, on his index finger, jabs a point into his palm and retracts; Dobson winces. “You want to know about the young one,” he says.

 

Hellboy crosses his arms across his chest, matching Abe. “You bet we do.”

 

“Also a regretful incident. My sister took a liking to the child when she came to stay with us. We tried to persuade her that this place was too small to take a young one away with us, as we sometimes do, but she insisted. Her biological clock, she said.” He wrings his hands, droplets of water springing off to glisten on the grass underfoot. “She spends too long as a human. Biological clocks are a non-existent, ridiculous concept, but she took the child anyway, and the people of the village investigated. We were to leave this shore tomorrow, if you-”

 

“So the kid is, what? One of you now?”

 

“That is correct,” Dobson says apologetically. “His transformation is complete.” A taloned hand gestures back towards the ocean, and a small creature, slick-furred and moving too fast to be seen properly, breaches the surface for a short moment. “He is our child now. Not my sister’s. She was responsible for the impropriety here, and not a suitable parent.”

 

“Not a suitable - what about his _real_ parents?” The drizzle on land has almost disappeared in the twenty minutes or so since they went in, but the sky is still as dark as Abe’s expression now. “You’re shape-changers. You _change shape_. If Riley is one of you, he can turn himself back into a human just like you can. Or haven’t you told him that yet? So he won’t go running back to his actual family?”

 

“His transformation is complete, but his ability to alter his form will not be fully manifested for another length of time-”

 

“How long?” Hellboy interrupts him.

 

Dobson shrinks back, as if fearing a blow. “One year.”

 

An incredible weariness descends on Hellboy, expressed by a long, deep sigh; he rubs his forehead, eyeing the shape-changer. Thinking. A whole fucking year. What is he supposed to tell Hare? What is Hare supposed to tell the kid’s parents? But if there’s nothing else to be done- “Christ,” he says. “Okay. A year. You teach him how to change his shape and then in one year - to the _day_ \- you bring him back here. Right here. Back to his parents.”

 

“What if he wants to stay with us,” Dobson hedges.

 

“Then it’s not my problem anymore. What is my problem is that you give him the damn choice to stay with his human family, unlike your sister.” He shifts his stance wider, wishing he had his trenchcoat on. Makes his silhouette more intimidating. “And I _will_ be here, you understand? I’ll meet all of you here in a year and I’ll hear it from Riley’s own mouth that he wants to go home or back into the ocean. And I’ll make sure he gets what he wants.”

 

“If you don’t come back, you should know that the resources of the B.P.R.D. are at Hellboy’s disposal,” Abe cuts in, his fingers twitching near the combat knife sheathed in his shorts. “And I’d be happy to show you how grateful I am for the little scratch your sister gave me in person.”

 

Dobson doesn’t say anything. His first name finally makes its way to the top of Hellboy’s memory - Harald, like the ancient Norwegian king. Hardly fitting for a man whose human form looks like it’s liable to collapse in on itself at any moment, who finally yields to Hellboy and Abe’s hard stares and nods furiously at them and practically hurls himself back into the water. Hellboy isn’t even sure he saw the nod he gave Dobson in return.

 

“It’s a deal,” he shouts at the ripple below the cliff, swimming away from shore. “That was kind of anti-climactic,” he says, at a lower volume, to himself and to Abe.

 

Abe says, “Yeah.” He sounds almost regretful, standing half-naked beside Hellboy on the cliff’s edge with a stray droplet of water streaking down his face, and it takes Hellboy but a moment to realise why - it’s over.

 

That’s that. Problem solved. Or at least deferred, to be solved at a later time. Ordinarily he would be feeling satisfied, grimly or pleasantly, perhaps sore, but now his entire body from top-knot to toes is seized with a horrible, yawning sense of loss. Everything is resolved. They can go fetch their gear from the cottage, walk back down to the village while trading futile promises to call and write, and then Abe will be gone again. Except, really he’s the one who’ll be gone. It was so much easier the first time when he could pretend he wasn’t running away from anything.  
  
It’s nothing he can change. That’s what his life is now, fleeing the intangible spectre of a ghost of a prophecy of his true fate, procrastinating fighting the biggest monster of them all by fighting small ones, and he’s not about to stop now. Hellboy isn’t ready to face the music of _Anung un Rama_ writ fiery across the sky.   
  
So instead of thinking about any of it, he says, “Almost wish we’d had to do some fighting like old times. Oh-” He’d almost forgotten the knife Abe lent him earlier. “You want this back?”   
  
“Keep it,” Abe says, inhales deep. “I have to go call Kate. Ask for a ride home and explain what I was doing leaving without telling her.”

 

“You didn’t tell them where you were going?”

 

He shakes his head and turns back towards the cottage.

 

“Won’t they worry about you?” Hellboy calls after him, slipping Abe’s knife into one of his pockets, wrapping his hand around the grip. It’s just an ordinary military-issue combat knife, the same durable black plastic-and-metal of the one he lost in Greece, but it was _Abe’s_. That makes it more, somehow.

 

Abe’s voice carries back to him over the grass. “No more than they worry about you.”

 

* * *

 

Going home has never felt this much like dying, Abe thinks on their way down the hill. He and Hellboy walk together this time, hands brushing every stride they take, Hellboy talking quietly and steadily about the young man from the village’s reaction to their news - not particularly good - and then about where he’s going to go next. East, possibly. Or south, since that’s the way the breeze is whipping about their heads.

 

A real breeze, not quite a helicopter’s unerring whirlwind yet. Abe told them to take their time when he called, and he is taking his.

 

“Where do you think your next mission’ll be?” Hellboy asks. He rubs his chin, sticks his hand into his coat pocket, nods when Abe shrugs. “Well, I don’t know where I’ll be in a few months, but I’ll be back here in twelve. Have to make sure that guy keeps his word. Make sure the kid’s parents take him back okay if he wants to stay with them. Hell of a thing, your kid coming back to you a shapechanger.”

 

Abe says, “I’ll come, too.”

 

“Here?”

 

“I’ll take leave if I have to,” he says, vehemently. “You might need back-up again if the sister doesn’t want to give up the kid. Things could get watery.”

 

The dirt path transitions abruptly to thinly spread gravel, and Abe almost stumbles. They’ve overshot the clearing where his ride landed the first time - just yesterday, just a couple dozen hours ago - and he didn’t notice. Or didn’t want to notice. Wanted to keep walking with Hellboy until they reached the next town, or the next.

 

High in the sky, far away, Abe hears the noise of helicopter blades churning.

 

“I’ll be here,” Hellboy says. He takes Abe’s hand, red fingers interlacing with blue-green, steers him back around until they are facing the right direction. He doesn’t let go, keeps holding on as they enter the clearing and the hateful humming of the copter gets louder. They must only be a handful of minutes away now.

 

Abe turns to Hellboy and tips his head up to meet him halfway, kisses him like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do to stop himself from saying _goodbye_ or _don’t go_ or any of the things he might’ve said had he been on that hill when Hellboy left and doesn’t stop til the helicopter is hovering overhead, blowing up leaves and the loose sides of Hellboy’s coat. Hellboy pulls him back in when he does, anyway, for a last crush of dry lips before it’s time, truly time, for Abe to go.

 

He says, “See you soon,” and hops into the belly of the helicopter, signals the pilot to take off with a brusque wave. Hellboy mock-salutes, and smiles at him, and grows smaller as Abe gets higher. Before long, he is a tiny red dot amongst waving trees; but Abe, _twelve months_ repeating on loop in the back of his mind, fancies he can still see him smiling.


End file.
